Niki Payne, Content Writer

Niki Payne is a content writer at Bruce Clay, Inc. with experience writing as an op-ed columnist for her college newspaper, a front-page features writer for a local community paper, and as lifestyle/entertainment writer for more than handful of websites across the web. She stumbled into SEO in 2010 and has been learning all about it ever since. During her free time, Niki enjoys getting lost in a good book, singing karaoke, playing softball, and learning about online marketing and business development.

Having a website without any analytics is like playing darts with your eyes closed. The odds of hitting your target are stacked against you. Online marketing and SEO is no exception. You need to be able to see how your website is performing so the odds of reaching your target goals are all in your favor.

It never ceases to amaze me how often I come across business owners who have websites, but no analytics installed on them. While they may understand the value of research and data in their decision making process, they don’t know how to collect that data. I love that I can solve that problem for them through the modern magic of Google Analytics. They’re excited to learn that after they add some simple code to their site they’ll be able to:

Track and measure the results of their efforts

See how many visits their website is getting and where visitors are coming from

Access a clear vision of the role their website plays in the grand scheme of their business

Without this type of data to inform your business decisions, you are potentially wasting valuable time and resources on strategies and activities that do nothing to increase your bottom line. So, without further ado, here’s how to bring on the data!

You knew this day would come. It was bound to happen one way or another. This is how it went down.

President of our long-time SEO client BenefitsCafe.com, Bruce Jugan, a board member of the ALS Association Golden West Chapter, nominated Bruce Clay and the “whole team” to partake in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. We’re believers in the power of social media memes to accelerate awareness. Challenge accepted! Video and pics after the jump!

Ho ho ho! Tis the season to be campaigning. It’s that joyous time of year again to start planning and preparing for Cyber Monday, Black Friday and other holiday campaigns. For marketers and retailers across the globe, the holiday shopping season is upon us. And your holiday PPC campaigns need to be ready long before your customers start to get their shopping and bargain hunting on. In case you’ve been hibernating in a bat cave since Valentine’s Day, here’s a rundown on everything that’s changed in PPC since last Christmas when you gave your ad dollars away:

People consume content in a myriad of ways: they can read it, they can hear it, they can watch it. And everyone has a preference for how they’d like to consume their content. So, marketers, are you creating content in the format your audience prefers?

Not only does repurposing content generate media for consumption across your audience’s preferred channels, it also makes it easy to produce more content with minimal effort. You can save a lot of time and energy in the content creation process by repurposing content. Repurposing content is taking a piece of content and changing it to suit a different purpose or switching up the format to reach a new audience based on their media consumption preferences.

After almost three years since its last episode, SEM Synergy is making a comeback to WebmasterRadio.FM. It’s the Internet marketing podcast you don’t want to miss hosted by leading search marketing expert Bruce Clay, president and founder of Bruce Clay, Inc. With new episodes starting July 16 (THAT’S TODAY!) at 11 a.m. Pacific time, 2 p.m. Eastern time, Bruce Clay will be joined by co-hosts Virginia Nussey and Mindy Weinstein. Together, the trio will bring Internet marketers and business owners a weekly dose of news and commentary with interviews from the brightest minds in SEO, like next week’s guest Duane Forrester of Bing and past guests that have included Matt Cutts, Bryan Eisenberg and Avinash Kaushik.

With mobile Internet usage at an all-time high, Google has been cracking down on websites with poor mobile experience. Mobile web design and user experience must be addressed as part of any effective online strategy.

The way a site handles traffic from mobile devices can directly effect that business’s presence in search results. Just this month, Google announced it was adding a disclaimer beneath mobile search results that redirect smartphone users from the page they click on in the SERP to that site’s home page. From Google’s perspective, this disclaimer improves its mobile experience; meanwhile webmasters should be concerned if their mobile websites are ill-equipped to handle the growing number of mobile queries. The pressure is on for websites to provide a user-friendly mobile experience as the number of mobile queries surpassed desktop queries this year.

Last week, Bruce Clay, Inc. hosted #SEOchat on Twitter and the topic of discussion was SEO Education. Seasoned Internet marketers candidly revealed how they went about learning SEO, sharing tales of internships, books, training courses, conferences and more.

Having begun in the mid-’90s, SEO is still a relatively new industry — the education paths Internet marketers have taken is widely varied. Read on to discover how several SEO managers, senior SEOs and content marketers learned SEO. Read more of Internet Marketers Reflect on Their Experiences Learning SEO.

Ever wondered what it’s like to work with Bruce Clay, Inc.? We offer Internet marketing services including SEO, PPC, content marketing, web design, and social media marketing. Chances are you’ve read our blog, seen Bruce Clay at conferences or attended one of the SEOToolSet Training sessions … and now you’re thinking of hiring BCI.

Contracting an SEO firm is a major commitment — and even with an award-winning Internet marketing firm that’s been around since 1996, hearing what actual clients say about their experience with BCI is invaluable.

SourcingLine, an independent research firm based in Washington, D.C., recently interviewed four BCI clients as it prepared to release a series of reports ranking digital marketing agencies in major cities (SourcingLine currently ranks BCI as the No. 1 digital marketing agency in Los Angeles and the country).

Read what the following clients had to say in completely independent interviews regarding their experience working with BCI:

Still reeling from last week’s SMX Advanced? With dozens of sessions focusing on advanced SEO, PPC and SMM tactics, it was Christmas come early for Internet marketers attending the sold-out conference. With so much critical information coming out of the conference, we sent liveblogger Jayme Westervelt to cover key SEO, social media and content marketing sessions.

Some of the top highlights include the Matt Cutts You & A, where Cutts fielded questions on Author Rank, link removal and his favorite webmaster tools. He also confirmed an algorithm update that was neither Panda nor Penguin and announced Google is trying to make improvements to the reconsideration request process.

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